Jaden turned 6 this week, I’m up to 48 PepsiStuff points, and I just got back from Half Price Books and actually picked up three (3) sci-fi books… which means I’ve decided to start reading on a regular basis again (the 3 books are Crashlander by Larry Niven, The Mote In God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle and Robert A Heinlein’s JOB: A comedy of Justice)

And this episode of my weekly series has TONS of LOLcats. I know what you like (well, not you or you or you over there or you neither).

Some awesome fingers on a fiddle

For one, I’m a big fan of YES, and I love Smooth Criminal. When it’s played on a fiddle by an extremely talented fiddlist (fiddlerer), it’s that much better. This is really really cool. And only 2 minutes long!

Great Trivia

Caitlin (the 13yr old) has been asking me to “ask her some questions” to test her knowledge. We do this during dinner, car rides, playing Guitar Hero, whatever… SHE wants me to say “I’ll give you $3 if you can answer… [blank]”. Some of the questions have been “about how far away is the moon?” or “about how many people are there in the US right now?” or “how many American Citizens in the US are foreign-born?” But she didn’t get those even close, so she didn’t win any money.

The one that she DID win $3 on was – wow. I was SURE she wouldn’t get it. The question is

You have one minute to answer, and your answer needs to be within 200 of the correct answer. Add up all the numbers between 1 and 100.

When you only have one minute to answer, it’s very difficult for most people to try to estimate. But there’s a quick way you can figure it out if you think of it, and I was betting that she wouldn’t be able to do it. SHE DID!

FYI: The trick is to think – hmm, take one number from the top and one number from the bottom – ie, 99+1=100. Then take the next one from top and bottom because 98+2=100 also. 97+3=100, 96+4=100, etc. So now you’ve gotten rid of 49 of them (all the way to 49+51=100), so you have 4900, then you just have the 50 and the 100 left over, so the answer is 5050. I even looked online to see if this shortcut was there, but this one guy went all way too complex with his “possible solutions.”

So today I ask her another question, and this is SOOOOO her and me. The question was “how many letters are there are the alphabet?” and I really really just was asking a simple question, expecting the answer “26.” But no, she answered “11” and we were all confused, and it turned out she was counting the letters in “the alphabet” thinking I was trying to trick HER. Boy, we laughed about that one for a while…